Now out from Otoliths: tocsin by harry k stammer

Color me old-fashioned but I like print. It's why I do print editions of Otoliths, it's why — until I ran out of time, oomph, & money — I did a range of books under the Otoliths imprint.

Print demands a different set of inputs. Online, you have templates to work from & within, & provided you have a reasonable knowledge of code, you can stretch those templates. There's no real inside or outside: with Otoliths I have artificially created something akin to a book — cover, contents, a next page interior.

With print, the interiors are easy to prepare. Word & Adobe attend to most of it for you. But a book is a physical object, & to do the content justice, to treat it with the respect it deserves, requires someone to shape the clay to make it entire, to present it in a final form that the cover augments & makes attractive. As an editor I have always been conscious of the need to present work as its creator intended it to be; &, where possible, to enhance the surroundings that work appears in.

I think the, so far, nearly 200 offerings found on The Otoliths Storefront support my intentions. That outcome can, in a major way, be put down to the efficacy of the nearly 200 covers that harry k stammer has prepared over the last almost decade & a half, from a variety of source matter. To put it simply, with regards to the print output of Otoliths, harry has made much of it possible.

But harry is much more than a designer. He's a musician, songwriter, painter, & a poet, both text & vispo. tocsin, this current book, is the final part of a series that deals with the plight of the homeless in Los Angeles & the third that Otoliths has published. tents was one of the first books I published, back in 2007; grounds came out in 2014, the last book I published. It was always the intent, however, to temporarily open the door down the track & close the series off when the final book was ready.

So, without further ado, & with the grateful thanks of, if not a nation, at least this publisher for all the help harry has generously given me over the years, I can announce that:

Now out from Otoliths

tocsin
by harry k stammer
48 pages, b&w, with visuals
$9.95
Otoliths
direct link: http://www.lulu.com/shop/harry-k-stammer/tocsin/paperback/product-24304851.html

harry k stammer’s new book tocsin is the final book in a series that includes tents & grounds, both published by Otoliths. It continues to dig deeper into the realm of a homeless person’s mind as he/she lives in downtown Los Angeles. As Philip Primeau said of tents, "stammer mixes a sort of poetic cubism with wordplay, startling typography, and a wide array of other adventurous techniques with creative intensity rarely witnessed."

This book again uses experimental/visual poetry to explore the issues of homelessness.